One of the gross linguistic anomalies of postcolonial Africa, in fact, is that whole classes of countries are named after the imperial languages they have adopted as their official languages.

This nomenclature essentially reflects the extent of Africa’s political dependence on the ex- colonial languages. Business in government offices, in legislatures and judiciaries in much of the continent is conducted primarily in European languages. Not only is the fundamental law still based on European principles in many African countries, but the laws are expressed primarily in European languages. And in countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Uganda, Senegal, and Gabon, all speeches addressed to the nation are given in the relevant European language. This is quite apart from the educational systems of many African nations that are predicated on the supremacy of European languages as media of instruction, and some of which completely ignore indigenous languages as worthy topics of educational study.

It is in this sense that terms like ‘anglophone’, ‘francophone’, and ‘lusophone’ may be considered appropriate – not because they describe how many people in those regions speak those languages, but because they describe the degree and perhaps nature of the lingo- cultural dependence in the societies concerned. We must remember that Asia too was colonized by Europe; and yet nobody refers to ‘Anglophone Asia’ or ‘Francophone Asia’. The difference between Africa and Asia may lie in the scale of political dependence on the imperial languages, linking them much more firmly to many of the African countries, and their very identities, than to former Asian colonies of European powers.

— The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics by H. Ekkehard Wolff (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics)